Government funded community centers and public libraries used by Muslims for Jihad recruitment in the UK

The Muslim Parliament and a non territorial Islamic state
August 9, 2005

MIM: These postings from the notice board of the salam.org website run by Al Qaeda webmaster and MCB finance chairman Iqbal Asaria show how the UK governement allowed groups like Al Muhajiroun to recruit for Jihad using taxpayer funded libraries and Community Centers.

MIM: Here is a 2000 announcement for a lecture at a public library by Omar Bakri Mohammed for the "noble duty of Jihad". One of the logos on the message board links to the Muslim Council of Britain. Another announcement openly refers to Jihad recruitment and martial arts training at a government funded community center.

Introducing a National Event, 'The Forgortten Warriors of Allah'.Raising awareness for the Jihad accross the globe and for the Mujahideen who are sacrificing their lives for Allah (swt) and fulfiling their covenant with Him (swt).

"None has the right to be worshipped except Allah alone (Who) honoured His warriors and made His slave victorious..."(Bukhari)

Programme will include:Latest videos from Chechnya/KashmirExhibitions and displaysMartial arts demonstrationsBooks, videos and audio stallsDinner will be providedand more...

All Muslims are requested to attend and co-operate with us in raising awareness for this issue. 'Co-operate in birr and taqwa (good deeds and piety), not in ithm and udhwan (sin and transgression)' (TMQ)For further details or for transport arrangements contact:Noaman 0956 333 612 or Rashid: 0956 522 141Jazakallah khairun

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MIM: The UK government's decade long funding of radical Islamism, is illiustrated by this example of a conference being held in the Logan Hall Institute of Education where a conference on political thought is meant to honor a Muslim who is purported to have influenced the terrorist organisation Hizbullah. Not surprisingly the organiser Massoud Shadjareh is presently continuing his tax payer funded Jihad activities under the guise of human rights and under the aegis of the UN. Shadareh is now an employee of the British Council and according to his biography

Massoud Shadjareh is a founder member of the London-based Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) and has chaired it sine it's inception in 1997. The IHRC was founded as an independent, not-for-profit, campaign, research and advocacy organisation, deriving inspiration from the Qur'anic injunctions that command believers to rise up in defence of the oppressed. The IHRC is credited by the UN as a consultative body.

MIM: Notice for 1993 event which lauds the memory of Dr. Kalim Siddiqui who ' is thought to have influenced Hizbollah'.

The convention is about Muslim political thought. Dr Kalim's political thought even influenced Hizbullah (according to the Hizbullah Sheikh in charge of external affairs when he visited Dr Kalim's home in '93).

In his paper Beyond the Muslim Nation-States (1976), Dr Kalim Siddiqui wrote that

"...the Muslim political scientist must ask himself a simple question: is he any different from non-Muslim political scientists who have identical degrees, university posts and publications? The honest answer is 'no'... In fact, the Muslim [social scientist] is the standard 'believer' in Islam, but his science is non-Muslim. The Muslim 'faithful' and the non-Muslim political scientist live in the single individual side-by-side and are the cause of much confusion. And when this schizophrenic 'Muslim political scientist' sets out to pronounce on 'the political theory of Islam' and 'the Islamic State', the confusion is worse confounded."

The formulation of Islamic disciplines equivalent to the western social sciences was one of the Muslim Institute's key objectives when it was established in the 1970s. Dr Kalim regarded this an essential pre-requisite to the re-emergence of Islamic civilization. The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 changed the Institute's priorities to the study and service of the resurgent Islamic movement. Twenty years later, Dr Kalim is no longer with us; the Muslim Institute is sadly defunct, although some of its work is being continued by the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT); the Islamic State is functioning as a prototype Islamic society for the future; and the Islamic movement is an established force for change in the world. But the problems facing Muslim social scientists, and the challenge of developing Islamic understandings of social issues, remain largely unaddressed.

This last point was emphatically shown at the inaugural conference of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (UK) in London last month. The AMSS (UK) is an off-shoot of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in the US, which is the centre for the 'Islamization of Knowledge' project. This has been characterised as the 'adjectivization of knowledge' by some commentators; Dr Kalim was among many who considered that it represents no more than cosmetic tampering with what remains essentially a western system of knowledge. The speakers at the conference were largely Muslim academics working in western or IIIT-type institutions, and in many cases their confusion was palpable. And nowhere was this more the case than in the politics workshop.

The problem is simple: the western-trained Muslim looks at Islam and society through a western framework of understanding. Instead of understanding society and the world through Islam, he (or she) tries to understand Islam in terms of the western concepts which he knows. Thus, in the politics workshop, the discussion revolved around the 'compatibility' of Islam and democracy, and the need to implement 'neutral democratic values' (such as social justice, freedom of speech and human rights (( as though Islam is lacking in these areas) in Muslim societies. Instead of non-Muslim concepts being studies, understood and judged according to Islamic values and standards, we find the westernised Muslim intellectuals trying to understand, and daring to judge, Islam through western eyes and according to western standards. This is inevitable because that is all they know, but it cannot possibly be correct.

The question, Dr Kalim once said, was whether it is easier to improve the intellectual training of future generations of ulama trained and brought up in Islamic traditions; or to improve the Islamic understanding of westernised Muslims. In the Draft Prospectus of the Muslim Institute (1974), he proposed a partnership in which westernised Muslims would play a leading role; later he sometimes saw them as part of the problem rather than the solution, not least because of many Muslims' willingness to compromise their Islam in order to maintain their academic positions. The instinctive 'political correctness' of such academics is seen in their automatic, unthinking insistence on 'democracy', and their equally automatic rejection of all political jihad as 'terrorism'.

Nonetheless, there were also many Muslim social scientists at theAMSS (UK) conference(particularly students(who were genuinely concerned with these issues, and whose commitment to Islam is unquestionable. The intellectual work that the Muslim Institute set out to do remains to be done, and must be done within the framework of the Islamic movement. The objectives of the Islamic movement cannot be fulfilled without it. This work requires, however, two key things: a recognition of the hostility of the west and the inevitably political nature of the Islamic movement; and the involvement of Muslims -- ulama and western-trained Muslim social scientists alike -- who are commited enough to reject the easy pickings of western academia, brave enough to question the west's received truths, and humble enough to recognise their own limitations in each others' areas.

Dr Kalim Siddiqui referred to the Muslim Parliament as both 'a minority political system for Muslims in Britain' and a 'non-territorial Islamic State.' Many people regarded these terms as meaning the same thing, and being virtually interchangeable. Dr Siddiqui, however, understood and meant them quite differently, and the distinction is vital to appreciating his vision of the Muslim Parliament.

When Dr Siddiqui spoke of the Muslim Parliament as a 'minority political system', he was talking about it as an internal community mechanism for determining and measuring the concerns, opinions and priorities of Muslims, and expressing their common views on key issues. A political system, in this sense, is primarily an instrument of communication. Its role is to listen to the community, think collectively for the community, and speak on its behalf.

An Islamic State, on the other hand (territorial or non-territorial), is far more than that. It is the executive arm of the community, empowered and authorized to act on their behalf. The key word here is 'power' - the State is the instrument by which a community can exercise its collective power in action. It is this concept of power which is central to understanding Dr Siddiqui's vision of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain.

Dr Siddiqui had emerged as a British Muslim community leader during the Rushdie controversy, and it was at this time that his ideas and thinking on the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain crystallized. What the Rushdie affair did, Dr Siddiqui believed, was to demonstrate the lack of power of Muslims in Britain. Muslims all across the country protested, marched, and burnt books, and numerous British Muslims tried to explain their position to the British media and establishment to no avail. Despite all the hurt, pain and effort of Muslims, Rushdie was feted and honoured as a hero, and remains so to this day, albeit a hero in hiding. This is in sharp contrast to the villification and slander which is the lot of authors whose works offend the Jews. The difference, Dr Siddiqui pointed out, was purely and simply a reflection of the relative power Muslims and Jews are able to exercise in the west.

Power is a key element of Dr Siddiqui's thought at every level. From his analyses of Muslim history - particularly Muslim decline - to his political thought on the global Islamic movement, the importance he placed on the power factor has always been a common strand. In his final paper, Political Dimensions of the Seerah, which he was still working on when he passed away in April 1996, he wrote that 'Power relationships are the basis of all relationships in nature... Islam achieves justice by regulating the use of power in all relationships. Islam does not equalize power. That would be against the state of nature. No order would be possible without power differentiation. But what Islam does is that is places strict limits and moral codes on the exercise of power at all levels.'

Nowadays, by contrast, power has become almost a dirty word, something to be avoided. Good Muslims, many people say, should concentrate on perfecting their piety and practices, without getting their hands grubby trying to interfere in power or political matters. This is a modern Muslim version of the traditional Christian separation of church and State, justified by the alleged instructions of Prophet Isa, upon whom be peace, to 'render unto God that which is God's, and unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.' The Machiavellian understanding of statecraft as being inherently amoral, an arena in which the end justifies the means, ethics and morality have no place, and which is no place for a God-fearing man, has been deliberately promoted by western politicians and political thinkers. This serves two purposes: it minimizes censure, and keeps troublesome 'do-gooders' working in marginal areas outside the political mainstream, which is left to the amoral pragmatists.

This attitude is totally alien to Islam which has always sought to regulate power at all levels of society. But, over time, it has come to be adopted by many Muslims for various reasons. Some are similar to those of the west: in order to justify the abuses of the numerous illegitimate and oppressive Muslim rulers. But perhaps even more so, it has been a response to the Muslim failure on the stage of history; as political power passed not only to illegitimate Muslim rulers, but into the hands of non-Muslims, and all attempts to defeat them proved futile, so the loss of power was turned into a virtue.

Now, as the global Islamic movement is fighting to correct the results of this error, the attitude is still being actively promoted, in different forms, by the west and their secular Muslim allies whose interest it is to keep Muslims divided, weak and powerless. The successes which the Saudis and others are having in promoting non-political versions of Islam are among the greatest problems facing the global Islamic movement today.

Dr Kalim Siddiqui understood this apolitical attitude as an abdication of responsibility and a dereliction of duty on the part of Muslims. Islam is a social religion, which makes demands on Muslims collectively as well as individually. These collective responsibilities require that Muslims living together in one area organize themselves in order to be able to mobilize their resources and act together to fulfil their collective duties as Muslims. It is this collective organization of Muslims which is referred to as the Islamic State, and precisely such a body that Dr Siddiqui intended by the establishment of the Muslim Parliament.

Traditional Muslim theories of the Islamic State focused on Muslim majority areas, with Muslims in power. As Muslim power expanded, Muslim became minorities albeit ruling minorities, establishing Islamic justice and order for the benefit even of non-Muslims under their rule. Traditional Islamic thought on non-ruling Muslim minorities was that they should follow the Prophet's example and emigrate - make hijrah - to areas where Muslims did rule. This simplistic interpretation was soon confronted with harsh realities. First some Muslim minorities came under non-Muslim rule and had little option but to stay. Even worse, Muslim majority areas found themselves under non-Muslim rule in the colonial period. This was a possibility which traditional Islamic thinkers had never envisaged. Muslims were ill-equipped to handle it and reacted in different ways, some of which we discussed above.

Dr Siddiqui understood that the position of Muslims in Britain was different and new. Muslims did not come to the UK as conquerors but as workers or students seeking to better their lives. When Islamic civilization dominated history, people came from all over the world to study, live and work in the great Islamic cities. Now, Muslims were doing the same as the west established itself as the dominant civilization of the time. But, Dr Siddiqui understood, the solution to the new problems this situation created must rest in the re-assertion of old principles.

Reflecting on the experience of Muslims as minorities during the time of the Prophet, upon whom be peace, Dr Siddiqui focused on the situations facing the Prophet in Makkah and later in Madinah, as well as the experience of Muslims who left Makkah before the hijrah to find safer conditions in Habasha. Dr Siddiqui pointed out that in all these circumstances, the Prophet and other Muslims dealt with non-Muslims not as individuals but collectively. In minority situations, divorced from the main centres of power, as in Makkah and Habasha, Muslims related to the rest of the population as a community, as strongly, powerfully, and as self-sufficiently as possible.

The State in the west is dependent on control of territory, and all those living within that territory are obliged to pay total allegience to the State, whether they like it or not. In Islam people are organized into communities which may or may not control territory. In Habasha, the Muslims settled on territory controlled by the Negus under certain conditions: they would be free to practise Islam, organise themselves, and maintain community structures separate from those of the Negus's State. Their obligations to that State were also restricted.

Islam being a fair, just and realistic system, the way it treats minorities living under its rule is similar and comparable. Instead of treating these minorities as individuals outnumbered by the Muslim majority and therefore subjected to what Dr Siddiqui called 'the dictatorship of the majority' in a 'democratic' system, Islam permits minority communities certain rights (which go far beyond those permitted in Britain or other contemporary 'democracies') in return for their accepting certain collective responsibilities. This is a formula which might, in modern parlance, be called a social contract between communities. The obligations of non-Muslims to the Islamic State are similarly limited. It is not expected that they should be as committed to it as Muslims, as they do not share the principles and assumptions on which it is based.

Dr Siddiqui thought of the situation of Muslims in Britain in a similar way. Among other things, he explicitly used the term 'social contract' in his writings on the Muslim Parliament. While he did not expect that the British system would change its principles to those of Islam, he felt that British Muslims could draw on traditional Islamic thinking on the position of minorities to learn lessons on how they should think, act and organize. While continuing to relate to the British establishment as individuals, and playing a full part in British social affairs, Muslims should also be able to think and act collectively in order to exercise community power.

Defined in Islamic terms, this would make them a 'non-territorial Islamic State'. In the British context, meanwhile, they would operate as a self-helping community in social terms, and a pressure group or lobby in political terms, seeking to influence political matters from outside the mainstream system. Their position would be dichotomous, without being contradictory. They would be thinking and acting both as British Muslims and Muslim Britons.

This would enable them to exercise the moral and social power of Islam even as a minority community in Britain. It would also enable them to pursue their particular goals and objectives as Muslims in Britain. And it would enable them as Muslim Britons to benefit British society as a whole by their demonstration, from a position of power and strength, of Islamic principles, values and ideas in the British context.

This is what Dr Kalim Siddiqui meant by the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain as a 'non-territorial Islamic State for Muslims in Britain.'